The curator revealed he had doctored the pitch in 1998 to spoil Warne's attempts to bowl around the wicket to Tendulkar.

"I kept the square patches outside the leg stump, on either side of the wicket, really hard. It was difficult to get turn from that part as there would be no rough there. After that game, Warne came to me and asked why he wasn't getting the turn and others were. I told him it was because of his dodgy shoulder that was to be operated on later in the series."

When the Indian board isn't part of your income, people tend to have a point of view that it is ruining the fabric of the game. Then there are the players, officials and media outlets that are commercially involved with the BCCI. These people only have good words for the board.

Can Australia's pace attack skittle India's comparatively inexperienced batting line up enough times to win a four Test series? Doubtful. Can Australia's dodgy top seven handle Rollerboy, OJ and Rashy enough times on spin friendly tracks to set targets for the bowlers? Doubtfuller.

Firstly, thank you for the wonderful feedback on Part Two; I’m glad that the majority of you agreed with me and that my article created discussion and debate about team selection as well as rotation/resting of players.

The ICC has admitted its Playing Control Team (PCT) made "an honest error" while applying the DRS to the Jacques Kallis review on the second day of the Newlands Test and that the batsman was erroneously given out.

Never realised then how much I would write about chucking in the ensuing ten years: 145 posts and counting (plus countless comments).

One of the recurring themes during that decade, or decayed, is players calling out chuckers, only for the players to backtrack, protest they were taken out of context, then belatedly apologise anyway, before blithely announcing: "we're all good now."

Rarely have I posted about a cricketer or commentator who has stuck to his guns and, despite the usual rumpus about racism, optical illusions and "everyone does it!", continued to call out chuckers.

Not once during those ten years have I posted about a bowler who admitted to a fair cop:

FOR a young man whose career was ruined by doubts about his bowling action, Aaron Bird takes a surprisingly hard line on chucking.

“Rules are rules,” he says, “and everyone needs to live by them.”

Bird is also bullish about the potential of in-game testing:

He thinks the technology on the horizon for in-game testing of bowling actions is a great thing, but until then, “umpires need to stick to their guns. If they believe someone has a suspect action they need to go through the right process”.

He goes further to suggest international bowlers should be checked before they are allowed to play in the Bubble:

“Cricket Australia should be looking to nip this in the bud before it gets to the game stage, so if someone is coming over for the BBL and there's been a few questions marks about his action, maybe they need to get him tested before the competition starts,”

Australia may seek to rest players more often on overseas tours rather than depriving home crowds of the national side's most high profile cricketers during the summer. Momentum is growing for the concept of using foreign assignments to give Australia's most heavily employed cricketers a break rather than home limited-overs games during January.

The corollary of Pat's proposal is that other countries may use Australian tours to rest their own players.

Not that Australia using overseas tours to trial players is entirely foreign. Adam Gilchrist's first ODI was in Faridabad in 1996 when he was being phased in and Ian Healy was being phased out. No doubt there were punters and pundits back then who screamed that they had paid to see Ian Healy, not some jug-eared debutante.

Seamlessly stitching together chucking and rotating: introduce in-match testing at Australian cricket grounds and you will guarantee international players are rested for Australian tours and the Bubble.

Is there even the remotest chance Murali, Botha, Ajmal and Hurlem Samuels would want to "bowl" in Australia if they knew an alarm was going to blare every time their arm flexed more than 15°?

This week's Blackest Day in the History of Sport and Everything in which the famed Australian notion of fair play was "shoulder-charged into oblivion" and we "killed a national icon with our own hands" - talk about your performance enhancing right there - highlighted two blights in the sporting firmament: drugs and match fixing. The ACC left out chucking, which I consider to be every bit as malignant.

"A couple of current umpires have said to me 'There is definitely something wrong with his action, but I'm not going to call him'. They are the ones who have to live with that. If you're an umpire you're meant to uphold the law so both teams get a fair shake. There's been some umpires who think, 'I'm on a good wicket here, I'm making good money, I won't rock the boat'. It's not my style, it's obviously theirs."

[This sentence is not online] "I think there has been a too hard basket for a lot of umpires and they've decided to let it slide."

Chloe Saltau in today's Age on how cricket's officials have been paralysed into inaction:

While Hurlem Samuels rightly attracted heat in the Bubble for his odious deliveries, Cricket Australia's Doubtful Bowling Actions Group Unit Panel will open up an interesting can of Pandora's worms if they manage to have chucking assessed in matches:

Privately, state officials have expressed concern about at least three bowlers this domestic season while questioning the will of CA to confront the problem.

Australian officials also hold great hope for new technology that would measure bowling actions in match-conditions. A sleeve, with sensors attached to the bowler's elbows, was tested during last year's under-19 world cup, and should be ready for first-class cricket in about two years.

The biomechanist leading the project, Marc Portus, has said the innovation would help rid the game of illegal actions, and remove some of the emotion from the issue by fixing flawed actions before bowlers reached international level.

It would also guard against bowlers modifying their bowling to meet the legal standards in a laboratory, then bending the rules while straining for wickets in the heat of battle.

Fans and players already keep an eye on the bowlers' speed readings, and they hold their combined breath when an umpire checks for a no ball after a wicket before cheering, swearing and "ooooo-ing" the close ones. And, of course, the technology is front and centre when there is a player referral.

Imagine the fun and games if the bowler's action is also thrown into the mix. Red light? Siren? "No ball!" over the public address system? What would be the margin of error: 14.5° to 15.5°? Not forgetting the bonus shenanigans when the likes of umpire Dick! Kettleborough seemingly ignore the technology, as happened several times this summer.

The great pity is that in-match assessment of actions was not available before the advent of stolen wickets and asterisk stats.

The one where Warnie runs out of ideas and back-pedals on his original ideas.

Warnie opened his big fat Tweet. Slated the muppets. Bagged rotations. Promised an "in depth article on the state of Australian cricket" in which Australian cricket should "pick your best team and stick with it in all forms." Then, staggeringly, picked three teams, none of which he managed to tie down to eleven players.

A resounding Cricket Australia board endorsement for the direction taken by the national team in the wake of the Argus review has been accompanied by the admission that plans have been poorly articulated in public.

Wally Edwards, the CA chairman, emerged from the meeting to say that while the board "unequivocally supports" Howard, Inverarity and Marsh's efforts to "implement the Argus strategy to build sustained success for Australian cricket over the long term", there was an acknowledgement that plans had not been adequately explained to the public.

"We're not unhappy. We're possibly unhappy that we haven't communicated as well as we could've, I think that's a fact. Certainly we didn't go into this with a great media plan to sell the idea of developing more cricketers, and more cricketers being available to play for Australia. If there's a weakness in what we've done that's it."

Even Shane Warne's so-called manifesto, which was really just a register of his closest friends, didn't tackle the lack of fitness that continues to wound Australian cricket. The great spinner has given us no more than the A-list for his next soiree.

Mike Atherton's piece is the pick of the three; in this esteemed company, no mean feat. Nearing the end of the atricle it dawned on me that Athers had completely reamed Warne and the Warnifesto:

Whereas Warne wants no rotation, England, in response to the demands of the fixture list, is rotating like never before, so much so that trying to follow the teams selected for the latest round of Tests, one-day internationals and Twenty20s is headache-inducing.

The AGB, the nation's conscience, refuses all paid plugs (unless you are a politician offering me discount rates on land about to be rezoned as a coal mine), but there's nothing the AGB won't plug for nothing, plus I've always liked being called "Bloke" - just don't call me "Shaggs" or "Champ" or "Knackers":